Career Design

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.

Do you feel lost about what you really want to do with your life? You might be hesitant because you don’t have a professional guide to help you make the right decisions. Perhaps you choose a path but end up regretting it later. Or maybe you feel unfulfilled in your current job and are unsure of what to do. Solutions are possible if you can get organized and efficient. All you need is the right guide and a passionate mentor. And with the proper help, you won’t have to sacrifice your happiness for a salary. Take your life’s direction into your own hands.

In one of the only books of its kind, a veteran design consultant offers the tools for success gained from nearly 30 years of developing corporate and brand identity programs. Readers will discover the most effective formats for design briefs, how to structure the best possible team, what distinguishes a great design brief from an adequate one, how to use the brief in project tracking, as a measuring tool, and as a means of getting approval for a design solution; and much, much more.

This book stitches together a complete design journey from beginning to end in a way that you've likely never seen before, guiding listeners (you) step-by-step in a practical way from the initial spark of an idea all the way to scaling it into a better business. Design a Better Business includes a comprehensive set of tools (over 20 total!) and skills that will help you harness opportunity from uncertainty by building the right team(s) and balancing your point of view against new findings from the outside world.

Despite how much is written about strategy, and money spent on it, reports of chronic failures persist. Two causes dominate. Strategy is still not fully defined, and strategy practice is still largely based on a planned view of the world. Change and innovation, however, are not wholly planned but emerge from the myriad interactions of the players involved—some by design, many not. This science of complex adaptive systems must be the bedrock on which strategy is built.

Belonging brings out the best in everyone. Whether you’re a parent, teacher, community organizer, or leader of any sort, your group is unlikely to thrive if the individuals don’t feel welcomed, included, and valued for who they are. The good news is that you can use design to create feelings of inclusion in your organization: rituals that bring people together, spaces that promote calm, roles that create a sense of responsibility, systems that make people feel respected, and more.

Going well beyond the recycled, superficial tactics in most leadership books, Thrive by Design introduces you to the triggers of exemplary workplace behavior at a neurological level. Tapping into these triggers leads to increased productivity, well-being, accountability, and retention. As you apply the practical approaches and tools outlined in the book, you will see less absenteeism, corrosive gossip, employee drama, accidents, and quality shortfalls.

In Design Any Disaster, certified emergency manager and master business continuity practitioner Patrick Hardy reveals the secrets of disaster preparedness that helped him build the largest and most successful small business and family disaster planning company in the world. He explains why: You should never, ever "remain calm" during a disaster, 99% of all disaster plans are a complete waste of time, and fancy disaster equipment and supplies actually leave you less prepared.

Cut through the noise of trial and error and step into mastery. With 'The Master Change Agent Framework,' the relentless pace of change isn't a daunting trial anymore; it's a mission you're ready to conquer. Your organizational transformation doesn't have to be a lonely battle. Equip yourself with the truth, tools, and tactics you need to design and lead successful change.

Frugal Value contests the notion that companies can rise to the great challenges of our time by adopting so-called "sustainable business" practices. Instead, the acute ecological crisis requires an all-round rethink of what business does and how it does it. This book explores what business responsibility looks like today and how it could be put into practice through far-reaching changes to companies, ranging from new approaches to product design and business models to reconfiguration of operations and innovative ownership structures.

In Design in Context: A Framework for Strategic Differentiation, Todd Bracher invites you to reimagine the role of design in business. Drawing from his extensive experience, Bracher presents a compelling case for why design should be integral to strategic planning and execution. This book offers a roadmap for business leaders and designers to work together, emphasizing the importance of differentiation in achieving sustainable growth.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: Ideas are cheap. Product follow-through is where the money is spent and made. That’s where heroes are forged, and excellent product design sparks what eventually becomes major growth. Today, products need to grow their user bases...from scratch, again and again. This book is a guide to the vital work of shaping a product into its sustaining engine. It’s a design-focused companion to methodologies like product-led growth.

Design thinking is not a new idea. Companies like Apple and Amazon constantly apply the design thinking philosophy from developing new products to design services to serve their customers better. It is a time-tested strategy, and now you can apply it in your business to achieve spectacular outcomes.

Do you hope to be coached or be a great coach? Or wish that your organization could execute its coaching mandate? Mark Colgate's 8 Moments of Power is the missing piece for those hoping to orchestrate a coaching change. In this engaging book, Colgate takes us on a journey with humorous stories, case studies, and pragmatic frameworks, while examining how organizations can create a coaching system that designs for, and delivers, continuous feedback that simultaneously increases employee and customer engagement.

The future of marketing is mobile, with 75 percent of the world's population having access to a mobile phone and the average American spending 82 minutes per day using her phone for activities other than talking. To traditional marketers unfamiliar with the special challenges of mobile marketing, this territory feels complicated and even frightening. Mobile Magic provides a bird's-eye view of the process of creating great mobile marketing from one of the world's most experienced and successful practitioners.

Unlike most presentation books that say the same things regarding presentation design and delivery (less is more, get rid of bullets and use images, emulate Steve Jobs, and so on), How to Be a Presentation God actually divulges step-by-step secrets for how to build, design, and deliver blockbuster presentations. By providing entertaining and clever presentation insights, veteran presenter Scott Schwertly gives you the ins and outs for presenting yourself, your business, and your cause with an easy-to-implement approach.

Hartmut Esslinger, internationally acclaimed designer and founder of frog design, inc., reveals the secrets to better business through better design. Having spent 40 years helping build the world's most recognizable brands, Esslinger shows how business leaders and designers can join forces to build creative strategies that will ensure a more profitable and sustainable future.

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate listeners on one of the hottest trends in business development: "design thinking", or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Jeanne Liedtka's recent book, The Catalyst: How YOU Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, was named a Top Innovation and Design Thinking Book by Business Week. Tim Ogilvie has been hailed as a visionary for his pioneering contributions to service innovation, business model innovation, and customer experience design.

I've discovered that skilled UX practitioners often find their best efforts thwarted by political obstacles. Either they haven't learned how to deal with a corporate culture that doesn't fully grok the value of UX, or they have yet to develop working relationships with other functional teams that are essential for UX initiatives to succeed. Navigating the Politics of UX: Strategies and Stories from 40 Years in the Trenches provides a playbook for managing and advancing your career as a UX professional. This series comprises three volumes.

Even for experienced facilitators, putting together a two-hour workshop can be daunting. Where to start? What to include? How to engage the audience? How to create impact and positive results? Above all, how to do all this quickly and effectively? Drawing on years of experience designing and delivering workshops all over the world, Leanne Hughes' The 2-Hour Workshop Blueprint gives you a formula to create sessions that hit the mark every time.